Event overview
GLITS (Goldsmiths Literature Seminar)
Two 20 minute papers will be presented at this session of GLITS.
Megha Agarwal, 'Falling or Descending: Presence, Absence, and Literary Guidance in Paradise Lost and Frankenstein'
Milton, in his re-creation of Genesis, not only metamorphoses his source, but also places himself above and beyond the subjects of epic poetry that preceded his own poetic enterprise. Guidance is not restricted to the sphere of poetry alone in Paradise Lost. Divine guidance and devilish misguidance shape and misshape Satan, Adam, and Eve’s choices. In the midst of two irreversible ‘falls’ (one results in the creation of Satan’s new abode, Hell, the other seals the fate of man as a fallible being), Milton’s protagonists question the labyrinthine nature of knowledge, divine justice, and creation. Probing into one’s own existence is ineffectual in the Miltonic universe, with its immutable heavenly laws, but it strikes a chord with the Monster in Frankenstein, as he vacillates between identifying with Adam and Satan. Literary guidance provides him with a vocabulary to articulate his plight. Shelley invokes and inverts the Miltonic tale of creation in her novel. The steady, preordained series of events culminating in the Fall that unfold in Paradise Lost are substituted by a self-inflicted descent into increasingly hellish circumstances in Frankenstein. Milton’s presence accentuates the absence of his structured, hierarchical literary world in the frenzied Frankensteinian narrative that amplifies the questions that were silenced in the epic. In this paper, I attempt to untangle and intertwine these two distinct journeys that revolve around the divine, infernal, and incurably human.
Monika Loewy, 'Embodying Her Ghost: Self-Replacement in Petzold’s "Phoenix"'
‘I no longer exist,’ mutters the protagonist Nelly under her breath in Christian Petzold’s 2014 masterpiece Phoenix. The film chronicles an Auschwitz survivor’s journey to find her husband Johnny, who fails to recognize her due to reconstructive facial surgery (resulting from a bullet wound). Echoing Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Johnny convinces her to take on the identity of his supposedly deceased wife (her ‘former self’) in order to obtain her inheritance. This thereby leaves Nelly haunted by her past self, and the desire to be replaced by it. However, I will suggest, Nelly begins to discover that it is not her, but her former self that ‘no longer exists,’ and in fact never did. In this paper, I will trace Nelly’s struggle to be replaced by, and to simultaneously replace, her pre-war self in a post-war Germany. In discussing these ideas, I will focus on psychoanalytic theory, predominantly using Freud’s concept of the uncanny and Winnicott’s notion of the True and False Self.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Feb 2017 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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